imessage down

iMessage and FaceTime are both experiencing outages according to Apple's iCloud system status page, and numerous reports flooding into iMore's various comm channels. Apple says service will be restored asap.

Online continues to be a huge challenge for Apple, and if you haven't already, I invite you to read why I think it's going to be one of Apple's biggest challenges going forward.

As always, let me know if iMessage and FaceTime are working for you, where you are, and when you get your service back.

Apple's iMessage service, their iOS and OS X SMS- and MMS- like service, is currently down for a lot of users. It's been going down fairly regularly as of late, though not for lengthy periods of time. Game Center, Apple's online gaming service, has also gone down or suffered from poor service over the last week.

Everything goes down. Google goes down. Amazon does down. RIM goes down. Microsoft goes down. We go down. But reliability is a feature and if something goes down or suffers from poor services too often, or even if perception starts to give people that impression, it's a problem.

A lot of us here at iMore along with friends and family members are having some issues with iMessage. Basically, we can't send or receive any! Are you guys experiencing the same problems we are?

If you seem to be having issues sending iMessages, you can turn it off from Settings for now so you can still send regular text messages. It's what we recommend doing until the service is back to working properly.

We're getting a flood of reports from many of you that iMessage is down and you can't send or receive messages over Apple's network. Unlike iCloud, Apple doesn't provide an iMessage status page, so it's hard to tell how wide spread the issue is, how critical any failure might have been, or project how long it might last.

If you are have problems with iMessage, however, please let us know when it started, where you are, and when it starts working for you again.